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Weathering a tragic milestone

She is Angelina Mighty-Osborne and few people come by their name more honestly than this teenager.

In July 2007, family mourns with Lorna Brown, holding picture of her slain son. Angie Mighty-Osborne is at right, her mother Ingrid is at left. (LUCAS OLENIUK / TORONTO STAR FILE PHOTO)

By Lisa WrightStaff Reporter

Tues., Dec. 23, 2008

She is Angelina Mighty-Osborne and few people come by their name more honestly than this teenager.

"Yo, people. Hi, Miss!" the smiling 18-year-old says to her school friends and teacher in the hall of her Scarborough high school, Winston Churchill Collegiate Institute.

"Hey Angie," is the typical reply, from the principal to the custodian. She knows students in every grade and is one of the most popular girls at the school.

But Angie's buoyant, bubbly demeanour belies the personal tragedy she has survived and worked hard to overcome. The Star tracked her progress over 2008.

In the last five years, five relatives – one in each year – have met a violent end, both here and in Jamaica. Most poignant was the death of her 11-year-old cousin Ephraim Brown, who was caught in the crossfire of a gang shootout at a birthday party last year.

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Angie is matter-of-fact about the murders, listing the losses in an email: "Matthew is my uncle and was shot nine times (2003). Ephraim is my cousin and was shot once in the neck (2007). Ray is my cousin and was stabbed to death (2006). Donovan is my cousin and was shot by the police in Jamaica (2004). Ricardo is my cousin and was shot by a friend (2005)."

In July 2007, Angie was attending the birthday party with Ephraim, in a Sheppard Ave. W. townhouse. "Easy E," as some of his little friends called him, was with other children in a laneway between two townhouses when he was shot.

A bullet pierced his neck during what police say was gang-related violence. At least a dozen bullets flew but no other children were hit.

"I was in the basement," Angie recalls. "The speakers and the music were really loud, so it was hard to tell what was happening."

Angie, who was then 17, was with the boy after he was shot, along with Ephraim's sister and another aunt, who were comforting Ephraim.

"By the time I saw him, his chest was heaving and blood was trickling down from where he was shot. He just wanted his mom."

Ephraim's mother, Lorna Brown, lived nearby. Angie had the brutal task of being the one to tell her aunt that her only son was shot. They ran together back to the townhouse where Ephraim was and waited for an ambulance.

"She always kept a close eye on him. They used to go everywhere together," Angie says. "It was the first time she ever let him go somewhere without her. It was just one time and that happened."

A year later, Brown still feels the loss as though it were yesterday, visiting the boy's gravesite every day and regularly praying for him at her North York church, where the packed funeral and subsequent memorial were held.

And a year's perspective has left Angie still struggling with the events of that day.

"That night still haunts me and the faces of the two guys who were trying to kill each other, and killed him instead, haunt me, too.

"I just wish that I was paying more attention that night and maybe I could have seen what was going on before it happened.

"The people who did this have no idea how they have damaged our family and, more so, my aunt Lorna's life. She misses him more than anyone else and I know she'll never recover from it."

One bitterly cold February day, Angie sits weeping in the hallway of the North York courthouse at 1000 Finch Ave. W. With her are her mother Ingrid Osborne and Ingrid's sister, Lorna Brown. It has been seven months but the emotional wounds are, plainly, still fresh.

"We just saw some pictures of Ephraim," Angie says, explaining to a Star reporter why they are so upset. "... We saw pictures from the autopsy and his clothes. ... It brought it all back."

Two men – Akiel Eubank, 20, and Gregory Sappleton, 21 – are charged with first-degree murder. Angie has taken the day off school to see if she will be called as a witness at the preliminary hearing but it turns out she will not.

"I can just be here anyway today with my family, crying," she says.

Some relatives of the co-accused are here, too. That's the tricky thing about a courthouse – families of both the victim and the accused are pretty much confined to the same areas and frequently bump into each other

A couple of police officers are keeping watch.

There is a short break in the proceedings and Angie finds herself sitting alone in the hallway. A shouting match erupts on the sidewalk outside. No one from security or at the nearby metal detector seems too concerned but Angie senses trouble. "Oh, no," she cries, running out the front door.

It's her mother and one of the relatives of the accused yelling at each other. Ingrid Osborne feels they are showing disrespect to her family.

"My sister has been through enough," she shouts, with Brown quietly standing by her side, looking sadly at the ground.

Angie manages to take her mother and aunt across the parking lot to cool off. No more words are exchanged. Separately, they all return to court, sitting on opposite sides of the room.

Angie's high school is no stranger to tragedy, having lost two 16-year-old students eight months apart in the 2007-2008 school year: Mahamed Abdi Warsame – known affectionately as Moe – who was in Grade 11 when he was beaten to death in May in a Scarborough highrise stairwell; and Dineshkumar Murugiah, who was knifed to death just off school property the previous September.

"After what I've been through, I was actually really numb to it," Angie says of the student murders. "But I could understand how bad other people were feeling."

Many of the students met with on-site youth counsellor Caralee Wiseman to talk about their feelings after the deaths. Wiseman, a youth worker from the West Scarborough Neighbourhood Community Centre, is considered a miracle worker at Churchill because of the friendships she has built with the kids over the last few years.

Wiseman says, as long as there is a support system in the school or a nurturing environment after such tragedies, students should be able to bounce back from it and probably won't suffer any adverse, long-term effects.

"There could be a lot of internalizing if students don't talk about their feelings. ... After Mahamed's death, for instance, we went on Facebook and set up a group to communicate with other kids who have been through this. We talked about everything from how to act in a mosque (at the funeral), to what the girls were expected to wear, that kind of thing."

Angie, with her intimate knowledge of loss, has made what could be an important contribution to the well-being of school communities city-wide.

In the spring, in the wake of so many deaths, she recommended that Churchill set up a youth-led bereavement response team to help kids in other schools cope with similar tragedies.

Wiseman had worked closely with Angie and her mother when the teen had struggled early in high school. Now, she has jumped on the idea and the school has followed through.

Fifteen Churchill students are involved, working with Wiseman and two youth outreach workers. The students have all experienced a loss, eight of whom had someone close to them die through violent means.

The students meet bi-weekly and had an intensive two-day training session, led by the Bereaved Families of Ontario, that focused on building trust and learning how to be supportive.

Those skills were used in September, when students from Churchill visited kids at Bendale Business and Technical Institute after a school shooting that injured a 16-year-old boy and put the school in lockdown.

"They're not taking the place of social workers," Wiseman says of the Churchill team. "It's about youth talking to youth as a support."

Angie – who wasn't even aware this carried on after she left high school – deserves the credit, Wiseman says.

"Since it was Angie's baby, I'd like to come up with a name that recognizes her. Like 'Angie's Angels' or something like that."

Tomorrow: Her efforts pay off.

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